Prices for Digital Video Disk players will have to fall well below $500 before they become the mass market items they were conceived to be, and doing its bit to that end is Milpitas, California-based C-Cube Micro- systems Inc. The company has come out with a single chip that does the work of six – combining eight functions – used in current digital video disk players. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Aiwa Co Ltd have already adopted C-Cube’s ZiVA decoders for the development of video disk products. The company did not give details of the chips in the ZiVA family. The encoding chip will enable a full 133-minute feature film to be encoded in real time onto a single disk. Data Translation Inc, Marlborough, Massachusetts is the first company to use ZiVA parts, using the Digital Video Disk standards in a $1,000 digital video storage system called Broadway 2.0, designed for use with Internet Web pages, multimedia presentations and computer-based training.
